I'm becoming more and more a fan of the "cloud" every day. I use it routinely (Dropbox) to work on projects at home and work. I save my work, go home, and there it is. I save a file and a colleague can open it almost instantly on his machine. However, just yesterday I was working with another colleague (that lives on the East Coast in a small town) and said "How's your internet connection?" to which he replied "Terrible, it's a pain just checking my email, at work and home". In this case the entire "cloud" becomes moot. So what if it's convenient if you can't transfer the data? How does a fast local machine help in this instance? This will be the biggest problem with all cloud services; if you can't transfer data the entire thing falls apart. The biggest proponents of the technology have very fast connections or even T1 and greater services available. This is not isolated either; there are many reports of how the ISP services still haven't rolled out high speed equipment to more rural areas (despite denying that they do this) and charge the same fees for "high speed". I know of one person that had their ISP confirm the system was bad; their response was to finally simply stop going out to his location. Until everyone has high speed connections, all the fancy, fast machines will mean absolutely nothing "in the cloud".

I may be alone here, but I'm guessing that I'm not. I have a fear that my design could be compromised and/or stolen if I leave it in the cloud. What measures are you taking to ensure the safety of my design? I know it's an old argument, but it's still valid.

Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

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